TiVo has just announced that its replacing the 320 GB TiVo Premiere with a newer 500 GB model, netting buyers an additional 65% more storage. The new units start shipping on March 25th. In addition, the company has also lowered prices on the rest of its hardware lineup, as well as on the service plans as well. Here's the new pricing for the Premiere, Premiere XL, and Premiere Elite:

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The TiVoPremiere Elite was released this week, and many have been wondering if the only changes are the addition of a couple of tuners, and more hard drive space. Well, as it turns out, one immediately noticeable difference is just how fast the Elite is when compared to the non-Elite TiVo Premiere. In fact, it boots up in half the time, and you can move through the menus virtually lag-free. A thread on the TiVo Community forum goes into detail on what we know about the Elite so far:

Newer 14.9 software (instead of 14.8)

Newer kernel revision 2.6.18 buildmaster93 (instead of buildmaster64)

Newer GCC 4.2.0 compiler used (instead of 3.3.4)

1024 MB of RAM (instead of 512 MB)

SMP support enabled during boot process (instead of ?)

Quad Tuner support (instead of dual cable & dual OTA)

After the break, we've got the full breakdown of what each of those changes means, and how they make the Elite a powerful and worthwhile beast. If you're interested, you can pick up the TiVo Premiere Elite now on Amazon.

TiVo's four-tuner Premiere Elite box is now available. Some were able to grab them over the weekend, prior to the official launch, and have been digging deep into the system to find changes, improvements, and bugs. The big rumor is that this TiVo is packing dual core support, and also makes multi-room Premiere-to-Premiere streaming a reality (so, no more needing to copy a show from one box to another.) There were a bunch of features that seemed to go missing, but we're guessing they've been lit up today alongside the launch of the box.